They are at least a wholly new region; for though peopled for hundreds, or perhaps thousands of years, and visited in the old times of European commerce with more frequency than even in our active day, their actual condition remains nearly unknown: their fertility is comparatively neglected; their spontaneous products are left to waste; their singular beauty is disregarded, and their mineral wealth is unwrought. Their people are content with savage existence, and the bounty of Heaven is thrown away in the loveliest portion of the globe. Piracy at sea, war on land, tyranny, vice, and ignorance, are the habits and characteristics of a zone which could sustain a population as numerous as that of Europe, and supply the wants and even the luxuries of half the world. Celebes, New Guinea, Timor, Java, Borneo, that most magnificent of all islands, if it should not rather be called a continent: the vast group of the Philippines, only await the industry and intelligence of Europe. They will yet be brilliant kingdoms and mighty empires. Why such noble realms should have been long given over to barbarism is among the most curious questions of the philosopher, and of the Christian. May they not have been kept back from European possession and utility on the providential principle, which we discover so often in the general order of the divine government; namely, to be reserved as a reward and a stimulant to the growing progress of mankind? They may have been suffered to remain in a state of savage life as a penalty for the profligacy of their people, or they may have been condemned to their mysterious obscurity until the impress of British power on India and China should have been deeply made, and England should be led, by the possession of India and the opening of the Chinese coasts, to follow the new course of wealth prepared for her in the commerce of the Indian Ocean. Whatever may be the truth of those suggestions, nothing can be more evident, than that British discovery and British interests are now involuntarily taking that direction. The settlement on Borneo by the enterprise and intelligence of Mr Brookes has given our commerce, a sudden and most unexpected footing in this queen of the Indian Ocean. The English colonisation of Australia will inevitably sustain that intercourse. The flourishing settlement of Singapore, and the growing population of the west coast of America, from Oregon down to California, all converge toward the same result, the increased commerce and civilisation of the Indian islands.